Trustic Anti-Spam Service To Close

An anonymous reader writes "I recently received an email from the anti-spam service Trustic saying: "We have decided to close the Trustic service. We have determined that the system as it currently is designed will not achieve the level of accuracy that we require, and an inaccurate system is worse than no system."" We covered Trustic's anti-spam service, which billed itself as "a community-based block list that prevents untrusted servers from sending spam", as recently as a couple of weeks ago.

Comments

On blocking spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Say what you want about statistical anti-spam methods implemented server-side or locally, but they work. Either SpamAssassin or SpamPal do their job at above average level.

Re:On blocking spam

[OMEGA Power]

Either SpamAssassin or SpamPal do their job at above average level.

Agreed, I've been using SpamAssassin and would say it averages about 2 missed spams per 1,000 messages and almost no flase positives (I don't have a exact number but I would estimate about 1 in 20,000)

It really wasn't very accurate

[sgifford]

I've been doing some research about the accuracy of different spam-blocking solutions, and Trustic had a huge false-positive rate. It misidentified 8% of my personal non-spam mail as spam, including mail from my Mom (it blocked our local cable ISP completely), my aunt (it blocked some AOL MX's), my insurance company (who the hell knows why), security warnings from CERT, and the NANOG mailing list.

It did have a good blocking rate---65%---but using a combination of other RBLs (the most optimal I found was DSBL + SpamHaus + Blitzed) it's possible to block nearly 75% of spam with only a .02% false positive rate (a single mailing list correspondent with an Argentinian ISP that has open relays was blocked).

It really is probably best that they laid this project to rest.